"I want to understand Elizabeth's reply by thinking about gender not as an essence but as a set of relations (May, 1986) and to propose that at the heart of gender is not "masculinity" or "femininity" but the difference between them" (335-336)"gender as critiqued and gender as critique, gender as a concept that not only requires scrutiny but can itself illuminate other matters...
337 - “In other words, the category of ‘sex’ is not transparent but is itself a dense weave of cultural significance, and ‘the contrast masculine/feminine,’ as the representation of what psychoanalysts commonly refer to as ‘the anatomical difference,’ addresses a variety of matters, not all of which are germane to sex, gender, or the genitals.” 339 - “ In this process, ‘gender’ appears to be less a determinate category than something resembling a force field.
“she replied that the danger lay in the shoulder, not in the crying: she would cry only on a man's shoulder; she was not interested in women”-it’s so interesting to see what humans assign importance to“the heart of gender is not "masculinity" or "femininity" but the difference between them.
